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- Date:
- Tuesday , October 21, 2008
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
FarCry 2 Early Performance Preview
The much anticipated FarCry 2 is being released today! We have some apples-to-apples performance testing that gives a preview of how current-gen video cards from NVIDIA and AMD stack up. Today’s video cards are capable of huge resolutions with dialed up quality settings.
Introduction
Our coverage here is simply an early performance preview of FarCry 2 as we just got our hands on the final build of the game yesterday. We have our usual deep dive on gameplay experiences planned for later. Hopefully our preview will give you some insight into performance in FarCry 2 with the latest video cards from NVIDIA and AMD.
FarCry 2 is likely 2008’s most highly anticipated game. Keep in mind this is not a sequel to the original FarCry. FarCry 2 is an entirely new game with a new storyline developed by Ubisoft Montreal rather than Crytek like FarCry. Another important point for the hardware enthusiast is that this game does not use the CryEngine 2 3D gaming engine that was used in Crysis and Crysis: Warhead. FarCry 2 uses a proprietary game engine called “Dunia” made specifically for this game and there is very little to be found out about in terms of specifications.
The Dunia engine fully supports DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 with some advanced physical effects such as a live propagating fire and weather systems in the game. Wind will actually be able to blow fire and spread it creating havoc for the player. All of these things are great for improving the gameplay experience, and we will talk a bit more about them in detail in the full evaluation.
Drivers
Both NVIDIA and AMD are gearing up for this game to be a smash hit with gamers and be the next “benchmark” for video cards. In that vein both are releasing new drivers to be used for this game that improve performance. From NVIDIA we have release driver 180, specifically 180.42 which we are using in today’s testing. From AMD there is a specific Hotfix driver that has been released for FarCry 2, which we will be using for the AMD video cards. To see what our system specifications are for testing, click over to this page taking note of the specific driver versions and hardware being used.
Apples-to-Apples Testing
For all of these apples-to-apples tests we have every video card being tested at the exact same settings. We have DirectX 10 enabled in the game with the absolute highest in-game settings possible that this game supports. The resolution is set to 2560x1600, AA is disabled, and AF is at the highest level the game supports.
For our run-through today (and likely today only) we chosen the first five minutes of gameplay in FarCry 2. We know there is a built in benchmark for this game, and we did play with this, but as usual it plays a scripted run that anyone could manipulate and therefore is not our choice of evaluation method. As usual we will actually be using gameplay…in order to show our readers what they can expect at home on a comparable system. Since we haven’t had the game for more than a few hours or a chance to play through it all, we haven’t had a chance to determine good run-through spots that represent a “worst case scenario” in terms of graphical challenges.
We started a single player game and played the game ourselves with the settings spelled out above. We decided to use the first five minutes of the first mission for this preview. In this you are sitting in the back of a Jeep being driven to a hotel in town. Our performance graphs represent the trip from the start of the drive to its endpoint at the hotel. This will just give us a preliminary performance test before we deep dive into the game and really get down to the meat of it all.
4850, 4870, GTX 260
From this grouping of video cards we find the Radeon HD 4850 performs the slowest, and is actually not very playable at all dipping below 30FPS for extended periods of time (keeping in mind of course that we have a $170 video card running at 2560 resolution). The Radeon HD 4870 is doing very well here and for the most part it is actually faster in framerate than the GeForce GTX 260. It is very interesting how this turned out, we much expected the GTX 260 to win over the 4870, but it is not right now. Keep in mind this is the original 192 stream processor GTX 260, not the new 216 core.
4870 X2, GTX 280
In this high-end comparison we see that the GeForce GTX 280 is pulling faster framerates than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. However, all may not be going right for the Radeon HD 4870 X2 here. See the graph below.
4870 X2 vs. 4870
We double checked this, but it appears that the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is not performing much faster than the Radeon HD 4870. It does not appear that both 4870X2 GPUs are accelerating this game for added performance over the single-GPU Radeon HD 4870. We don’t quite know what to make of this just yet; we were using the new Hotfix AMD driver so the latest driver was being used. It may be that CrossFire isn’t working with this game yet, or it could mean there is simply a bug.
That all said the 4870X2 looks to be a monster in FarCry if AMD gets the scaling fixed as it will likely best the GTX 280 by a fair margin. Then again, the 4870X2 is about $125 more expensive than a GTX 280 as well.
GTX 280 vs. GTX 260
One other comparison we just wanted to throw into the mix was a GTX 280 versus GTX 260 comparison. Here you can see how performance scales between these two graphics cards in this game.
Summary
The very first thing you will notice when looking at these results is the high settings in this game that are actually playable. FarCry 2 is certainly no Crysis. (Pun Intended.)
We were easily able to play in DirectX 10 mode on all single PCB video cards here at the absolute highest in-game settings possible. Yes, all the drop-down boxes shown above are at their highest quality settings! This is very exciting and surely is a breath of fresh air from the horrid DX10 performance we’ve seen in Crysis and Crysis: Warhead and even Stalker: Clear Sky.
FarCry 2, on first impression, is much more “simple” in graphics than Crysis. A good way of thinking about it is that the game is less “busy” than Crysis. There is less of a graphics orgy going on. It may be that gameplay was the focus here more than showing us a plethora of 3D eye candy. Don’t get me wrong; Far Cry 2 is beautiful, the graphics so far from what I’ve noticed are very crisp and clean, and the texture quality is quite outstanding and detailed. The level of textures and objects detail has been done very well and with the high level of performance the experience is engaging. Far Cry 2 doesn’t seem to go “over the top with graphics,” at least in the first five minutes. We still have a lot of gameplay to get to that has not been touched in this article. We do expect the level of graphical difficulty to rise as the game progresses.
In the meantime take a gander at a few screenshots we’ve snapped with a GTX 280 at 2560x1600 NoAA/16X AF with the highest in-game settings. These shots are very large, all around 1MB. These are JPEGs, but not highly compressed so artifacting should be minimal. The last shot is blurry, but that is a function of the game that we will not spoil for you.
Stay tuned for a more in-depth look at FarCry 2 at [H]!
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Discussion
Please join our HardForum discussion about Far Cry 2 and the hardware that we will all be playing on.